It actually felt like fall this morning, cool and crisp, with the days getting noticeably shorter. Farming is so much tied to the art of learning to read seasons. To adapt to the weather, to have a plan but to know how to change it based on how the season is going. This year has been an incredible season for fruit crops, the hot days are what these subtropical plants love best, whereas our lettuce and collards are starting to look a bit sad and out of place. We've experimented with some greens that love the heat (Carlton Komatsuna) while holding back on sowing more arugula and spinach. One of the amazing things about our climate is the ability (with the help of greenhouses) to grow both cool season crops and warm season crops in the same garden space. Both may take a bit of coddling during one time of year or the other but the diversity of what can be successfully grown here is pretty amazing. I recently read on one of my favorite blogs about a couple who grows citrus in a greenhouse heated by wood in Corvallis!

We began digging our potatoes today and as in most things I feel like I still have a lot to learn about successful potato growing. We decided not to water our potatoes this year and strangely enough we still got blight which seems to have severely diminished the yields on some of our varieties. Every season I try to focus on a couple of crops that I want to become more adept at growing. This year was supposed to be the year of onion and broccoli, but when we make plans the onion maggots laugh and we lost our whole onion crop this spring to these pesky critters. Pulling out all of our onion starts that we had only days before put in the ground was truly devastating. Next year we will try again, finding ways to keep onion maggots at bay and our potatoes blight free for more successful crops.

A lot of getting better at growing certain crops, in my case, is keeping note of what worked and didn't work this season so I can play on the strengths and minimize any losses that occurred. This season working with broccoli I've learned that there are certain varieties that work much better on our farm than others (Bay Meadows, Castle Dome and Gypsy have all proven strong in our system), I've learned that having an overhead irrigation system could potentially boost our yields, and I've learned that I need to grow a lot more plants than I had originally thought to fulfill all of our different markets. Our fall broccoli crop of Gypsy, Arcadia and Diplomat varietals is looking really beautiful, planted right before a mid summer rain and after a summer buckwheat cover crop, adjustments (and a little help from mother nature) that hopefully will allow us to see more success this season!

Grilled Eggplant - My favorite way to eat our eggplant is to quarter them lengthwise, toss them in olive oil with pepper and salt, and to throw them on a hot grill....delicious. (summer squash is also pretty amazing done up this way)